When I was growing up, my dad would get these boxes of fireworks every Fourth of July. He’d totally soak the ground first, put a pail in the middle of the wet patch, and we’d shoot off the Roman candles and fountains from there. It was like launching fireworks from the middle of a lake. He wouldn’t let’s touch anything except the sparklers. We’d stand there waving them in the dark while the bigger stuff went off, and it felt like the most exciting night of the year.
Around 2008 I drove up to Big Bear Lake and watched the fireworks display over the water. Among the best I’ve ever seen. It went on for an hour. I videotaped all of it because I couldn’t believe they just kept going. Fireworks reflected off the lake, the mountains dark behind them, and the whole town watching from the shore.
Independence Day has always been personal for me before it was political. It was my dad being careful with fire and generous with spectacle. It was a lake in the mountains. It was the feeling that this particular night belonged to everyone.
But as I got older, the meaning deepened. Independence Day reminds me that the freedoms I use every day, the freedom to write, to read, to build a career on my own terms, to practice my faith, exist because people fought and died to create and protect them.
What does Independence Day commemorate?
On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, formally severing the thirteen American colonies from British rule. The document, drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson, articulated a radical idea for its time: that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. For more, see what it means that 61% of writers use AI.
The Declaration was an act of defiance that put every man who signed it at risk of execution for treason. The Revolutionary War that followed lasted eight years and cost thousands of lives. The freedoms Americans celebrate every Fourth of July were taken, at enormous cost, by people who decided that liberty was worth dying for.
Over the centuries, the meaning of those founding principles expanded. The freedoms originally extended only to white male landowners gradually broadened through struggle, sacrifice, and constitutional amendment to encompass all citizens regardless of race, gender, or origin. That expansion isn’t finished. But the foundation, the idea that individual liberty is a right and not a privilege, remains the core of what Independence Day celebrates.
The fireworks aren’t just spectacle. They represent the rockets and cannon fire of a war fought so that the generations that followed could live free. When the sky lights up on the Fourth of July, it matters what the light represents.
My Grandfather’s Story
The freedom I enjoy has a face.
My grandfather was a soldier in World War II. He was captured on Corregidor and marched through Manila by Japanese forces. He spent three years and four months in POW camps. When he came home, he carried the experience for the rest of his life. Years later, I helped him turn his story into a memoir, working from his journals and firsthand accounts. That project became my introduction to ghostwriting and to the power of getting someone’s real story onto the page.
His journals told a different story than the one the family had passed down.
The family version had grown imprecise over decades of retelling, the way family stories do. The journals were specific: dates, names, places, details that only someone who was there would know. That experience taught me something I carry into every project: primary sources matter more than memory, and getting the story right is a form of respect.
On Independence Day, I think about him. The freedom to sit in my home office and write for a living, to choose my projects, to build something on my own terms, that freedom has a cost that someone else paid. My grandfather paid part of it.
The Freedom to Write
It’s easy to take for granted that I can write whatever I want. That I can publish books, write articles, express opinions, tell stories that challenge assumptions or explore uncomfortable truths, without fear of government censorship or imprisonment.
That freedom isn’t universal. Writers in other countries face imprisonment, exile, or death for their words. The ability to put thoughts on a page and share them with the world is a right that was established, defended, and maintained by people who understood what happens when that right disappears.
As a ghostwriter with 54+ completed projects and 113+ published books, my entire career exists because of this freedom. Every client who hires me to help tell their story is exercising the same freedom. The Fortune 50 executive writing about digital transformation, the brain surgeon sharing his memoir, the financial strategist publishing a book that challenges industry assumptions, all of them are using the freedom to put ideas into the world without asking permission.
The Freedom to Read and Watch What We Choose
I own thousands of films. I’ve written analysis guides covering over 200 of them. I read constantly and across every genre. I consume media for entertainment and as a student of craft, studying how stories work so I can build better ones.
That access is a freedom. The ability to walk into a library and read anything on the shelf. To stream a film from any country. To buy a book that challenges my beliefs or confirms them. To encounter ideas I disagree with and decide for myself what I think.
Censorship doesn’t just remove books from shelves. It removes the possibility of the conversation those books would have started. The freedom to read and watch without restriction is the foundation of the informed, creative mind that every writer depends on.
The Freedom to Build a Life on Your Own Terms
I spent twenty years as Director of Technology at Trader Joe’s. It was a good career. But the freedom to leave that career and build a ghostwriting practice, to set my own rates, choose my own clients, work from my own schedule, that freedom isn’t available everywhere, and it’s not guaranteed.
The ability to decide how you earn a living, where you live, how you structure your days, these are freedoms so fundamental that they become invisible until you imagine their absence. Independence Day is the day I make them visible again.
For writers, this freedom is especially meaningful. The choice to spend years on a novel that may or may not sell. The decision to self-publish instead of pursue traditional publishing. The option to write in genres that the market doesn’t currently reward because the story matters more than the trend. All of these choices exist because we live in a country where the individual’s right to pursue their own path is written into the founding documents.
The Freedom to Practice Faith
I’m a Christian. Independence Day reminds me that my freedom to practice my faith openly, to attend church, to draw strength from my beliefs, to let my values inform my work without hiding them, is a liberty that people in many parts of the world don’t have.
Religious freedom is bigger than my faith. It covers every faith, and no faith. The same amendment that protects my right to worship protects someone else’s right not to.
That symmetry is the point. Freedom of religion means freedom of conscience, and a society that protects conscience for everyone is stronger than one that protects it only for the majority.
| Freedom | What it means on the page |
|---|---|
| To write | Publish books and opinions without fear of government censorship or imprisonment |
| To read and watch | Read anything on the shelf, stream films from any country, decide for yourself |
| To build a life on your own terms | Choose how you earn a living, where you live, how you structure your days |
| To practice faith | Worship openly, and protect conscience for every faith and no faith |
What Independence Day Means to a Writer
Independence Day is fireworks over Big Bear Lake. It’s my dad soaking the ground and handing me a sparkler. It’s my grandfather’s journals from a POW camp. It’s the career I built with words and the freedom that made it possible.
It also reminds me that freedom isn’t free, a phrase so overused that it’s lost its weight. Let me put the weight back: my grandfather spent three years and four months in prison camps so that decades later, his grandson could sit in a home office in Florida and write books for a living. That’s a direct line from his sacrifice to my life.
Happy Independence Day. If you have a story about what freedom means to you, write it down. That’s what the freedom is for.
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More Literary Holidays
Related from the writer’s calendar: Memorial Day: Honoring the People Who Serve.
